Pee Wee Herman Is Back and Better Than You Remember Him

Paul Reubens loves his iPhone. The man behind Pee-wee Herman uses it for everything—as a translator, as a distraction from other conversations—and he reaches for it to demonstrate its miracles or answer its beckoning dings throughout lunch on a Saturday in Los Angeles. He also called me from it to very considerately apologize for being stuck in traffic and running barely ten minutes late for our meeting at El Cholo.

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Once Reubens is settled at our table in the Mexican restaurant, his iPhone goes off with an alarm instructing him to "Turn on lava lamp." Why does Reubens have to be reminded to turn on a lava lamp? Because it's gigantic and takes a long time to heat up, needing to be plugged in during the afternoon so that it's blobbing away by evening. He has a person to take care of it for him during the week, but, thank God, he remembered to switch it on before he left the house today.

Reubens is reviving his iconic character in the new movie Pee-wee's Big Holiday (premiering on Netflix March 18), channeling the road-movie mania of Pee-wee's Big Adventure in a feature coproduced by Judd Apatow; he took a five-year Pee-wee hiatus after the close of his live Broadway show in 2011, which followed a nineteen-year, mostly self-imposed Pee-wee hiatus after the finale of Pee-wee's Playhouse in 1991. In the stark light of digital streaming, Pee-wee looks a little older, a little puffier; his voice sounds a little lower and rougher. Still, Pee-wee retains that odd, ageless impishness. The 63-year-old Reubens does, too. During lunch, his eyes sloooowly shift to the left, looking at the table beside us. Or he'll push his chest back, tuck his chin down, and play demure. He's still got it.

Or maybe not. "Visually, there's something weird about it to me," he says. "I'm rebooting something that normally they would have gotten a different, younger actor to do." And he's certain, adamant even, that if and when the fifth Pee-wee movie comes along, we'll be far enough into the future that he can be digitally rendered as the 1985 version of himself and still look real. "I know I'm right. I can practically see the future."

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Reubens suggests a trip to downtown Los Angeles to try to find Santee Alley, where hundreds of Latin American vendors hawk every kind of tchotchke and where, with the right questions and enough convincing that you're not the police, you can score some great fake Louis Vuitton. "I'd rather have fake stuff," he says. "I don't like the idea of people getting ripped off and copyright infringement, but I do like that a lot of people can't tell that it's a fake Rolex. Like, you can't tell that this is a fake Casio." Reubens holds up a very real and very cheap Casio Databank, the calculator-sized proto-Apple Watch programmed with phone numbers that are presumably also available on his iPhone.

Reubens looks at the chips and salsa on the table with concern and asks if they arrived before my water. They came around the same time. "For a novice, a visitor to Los Angeles like yourself: Never eat the chips and salsa until the water's on the table." Why, Paul? "The salsa could be really hot and you'll be going, 'I need some water!'" he says, fanning his mouth. "That's it. That's all."

After Reubens finishes his albondigas soup, he checks under the plate to see if it's genuine Fiestaware and his phone dings again. "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I've been meaning to call her for two weeks." According to Paul, there's a small club of alter-ego people. Like, very small: It's just him and Elvira. But he's got a long list of fellow actors and comedians from over the years whom he calls close friends, all resolute fans of the Pee-wee character and Reubens's commitment to his innocently subversive brand of comedy. That fandom is what compelled Apatow to help Reubens make the new movie, pairing him with director John Lee and new acolyte Paul Rust on the script. "I always felt like I love this character and I want more of it," says Apatow. "Anything I can do from my position to make that happen, to support him and to get him whatever he needs to do something great, I'm going to try to do it."

Lots of people like saying nice things about Paul Reubens. And Paul Reubens likes hearing them. "I do feel really good about that. It's proof I'm not a monster," he says. "Or at least there is a group of people who think I'm not a monster." He takes out his phone one more time to show me an article he had cued up in his browser. In it, Robin Lord Taylor, who plays the Penguin on the Fox series Gotham, says how much he loved working with Reubens during his guest arc on the show. It's the third time he's read it today. "I do feel like so much of my personality and so much of Pee-wee Herman both are tied to 'You like me!'"

Once the check is settled, Reubens announces he'd like to leave first so that I don't see his car—it's crummy, he says. After he spends a few minutes finagling a free sample of pralines from the hostess stand—a bag normally costs six dollars, but Reubens is admittedly cheap—I let him know I'm going to hit the men's room and that he can take off. He says, "Mention my name in there; they'll give you a better seat." Paul Reubens has friends everywhere.

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